Financial innovation company R3 has officially announced that its Corda distributed ledger platform is becoming open source, which means that developers will get a universal access to the source code. R3 expects the initiative to encourage collaboration, review and contribution to the platform.

Corda, a financial grade distributed ledger capable of managing institutions’ financial agreements in perfect synchrony with their peers, was largely inspired by the benefits of blockchain systems. However, its design choices make it able to meet the needs of regulated financial institutions.

Richard G Brown, Chief Technology Officer at R3, said at the moment of Corda launch: “Corda is a distributed ledger platform designed from the ground up to record, manage and synchronise financial agreements between regulated financial institutions. It is heavily inspired by and captures the benefits of blockchain systems, without the design choices that make blockchains inappropriate for many banking scenarios”.

Corda was developed in close collaboration with over 70 banks and financial institutions. It supports a range of consensus mechanisms and has no native digital currency. The platform’s design directly enables regulatory and supervisory observer nodes. Meantime, an access to data is available only to parties that have a legitimate need to know. The transactions are confirmed by the parties to the transaction, not by unrelated validators.

David Rutter, CEO of R3, comments on the platform and recent news: “The successful application of distributed ledger technology to financial services relies on new solutions being able to integrate and work seamlessly with each other, otherwise the disjointed infrastructure financial markets are forced to operate with today will simply be replicated with different technology. The applications being built therefore need to be based on common, open, interoperable platforms – much like the common protocols on which the internet operates today. Open sourcing Corda is the next step in making Corda one of these platforms”.

Developers are welcome to download the Corda source code at Corda.net, the new website for Corda’s open source community. The front page contains the “Get Corda” link that opens up the public repository on GitHub with instructions on how to set up the platform.

The website also provides necessary information for non-developers, including an introduction to Corda, documentation, a blog and a discussion forum enabling iteraction with the R3 team.

The decision came right after the R3 had unveiled its plan to give bank members a 60 percent equity stake in exchange for the funding. R3’s funding will be raised in phases over the next nine to 12 months. The company has reduced the amount of equity funding it intends to raise from bank members from $200 million to $150 million. If R3 doesn’t manage to reach the $150 million target, it will attract other strategic investors such as a technology companies.

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